Seven Days in the Art World

Tavia Gilbert is upbeat and crisp as she narrates Thornton's ethnographic investigation of the modern art world. Thornton spends a day in each of seven different art environments: Christie's auction house, an all-day MFA art critique class, the Basel Art Fair, the site of the Turner Prize in London, ARTFORUM magazine, Takashi Murakami's art studio, and the Venice Biennale. It all involves dizzying amounts of money, self-conscious artists, pseudo-intellectual jargon, and provocative sculptures built by an army of workers. Gilbert keeps the listener's attention as she adeptly delivers the sly humor and sense of wonder. It's also an artistic trip around the world. Gilbert takes the smart route by only occasionally adopting an accent, but her choice does mean some loss of the international flavor, and one may forget that one is in Switzerland or Japan or Britain. A.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Starred review from June 16, 2008
The hot, hip contemporary art world, argues sociologist Thornton, is a cluster of intermingling subcultures unified by the belief, whether genuine or feigned, that “nothing is more important than the art itself.” It is a conviction, she asserts, that has transformed contemporary art into “a kind of alternative religion for atheists.” Thornton, a contributor to Artforum.com and the New Yorker
, presents an astute and often entertaining ethnography of this status-driven world. Each of the seven chapters is a keenly observed profile of that world's highest echelons: a Christie's auction, a “crit” session at the California Institute of the Arts and the Art Basel art fair. The chapter on auctions (where one auction-goer explains, “t's dangerous to wear Prada.... You might get caught in the same outfit as three members of Christie's staff”) is one of the book's strongest; the author's conversations about the role of the art critic with Artforum
editor-in-chief Tim Griffin and the New Yorker
's Peter Schjeldahl are edifying. Thornton offers an elegant, evocative, sardonic view into some of the art world's most prestigious institutions. 8 illus.